According to the Department of Energy, a little over 7% - quite a bit more than you'd expect (data from 2006).
But wait - most of that is Hydro. If you take away the dams, how much "Renewable" energy - Geothermal, Solar, Wind, Biomass - do you have? 0.86%.
What make up the bulk of our energy use? Petroleum (35%), Coal (28%), and Natural Gas (23%). It's simply impossible to get any appreciable amount of energy from renewables, and a price that anyone will pay. Remember, wind power costs around three times what alternatives cost, and it's eleven times more for solar.
But the Environmental Movement is invested in these. So what can we predict? Continued NIMBY assaults on Petroleum, Coal, Gas, and Nuclear, ideally extending these assaults to the Third World. Increasing numbers of brown-outs and black-outs, as existing plants age and become less reliable. More rhetoric about how sinful the Western lifestyle is, and how black-outs are the penance you must pay.
What else can we predict? The continuing collapse of the Environmental Movement's popularity. Personally, I expect the Clean Air Act to be modified within the next 15 years, to make nuisance suites much more difficult. The Third World will follow India's and China's lead, and tell Greenpeace to get stuffed; they won't guarantee the impoverishment of their populations to make a bunch of old lefties feel better about themselves.
The Long March Through The Institutions continues to destroy the Institutions. Faster, please.
5 comments:
Nukes seem cost effective. France, for instance.
I work for one of our largest railroads. Last week I watched our CEO's quarterly company webcast.
One of the items that caught my attention: Three years ago we had around 70 coal fired power plants in various stages of planning or building.
(Coal power plants are a good thing for a railroad since we then get to haul train loads of coal around.)
In the latest word we know of 7 coal fired plants in planning. Seven.
If we are trying to replace the generating capacity of sixty-some coal plants with solar and wind power, at the attendant higher costs, we are looking at the economic depressant equivalent of a codeine overdose.
Aretae, other than the regulation costs, yes. The French deal with this by whacking back the permitting hassles. You know, we keep being told that "We need to be more like Europe" ...
GuardDuck, your CEO is very likely not an idiot. Rather, there are likely millions and millions of dollars in government incentives (paid for by us, of course) that change this calculus.
There is a tantalizing option out there that isn't getting much talk. Solar cells seem to be going through a Moore's Law phase of growth - doubling capacity in every generation. Or, at least, so says Ray Kurzweil.
Last Winter, I was considering getting backup power for the hurricane season. I am naturally drawn to solar cells because once they're installed, they're free. They're also dead quiet. Most people use small gasoline powered generators, which require mass gasoline storage or almost continuous trips to the gas station. The other alternative is a natural gas powered generator that has fuel supplied by a gas pipe full time. Long story short, the options I was looking at would have cost around $60k, with rebates and credits included, vs. under $8 k for an LNG Generac.
But if solar cells drop in price like a processor or RAM chip, they could be practical in as little as 4 to 6 years. If that happens, we could be looking at putting solar cells on all new houses, with back up connections to the grid. That will end the big powerplant question.
I just want the teeny tiny little nuclear plant that I can keep in my back yard. There's technology that allows its creation, so we just need to get it to the affordable stage.
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